What unifies the work in Daniel Subkoff’s solo debut is an interest in physical deconstruction, in stripping the familiar painterly format back to its bare bones and observing what has been laid bare. This is hardly an original focus—the artist openly acknowledges a debt to Arte Povera—but, as Subkoff demonstrates, it’s one that can still yield revelations. It’s also a good test of an artist’s ability to do a lot with a little; there is not much more than wood, canvas, primer, and drywall in these constructions, but the condition they describe feels expansive.

In Bygone Began Begin (all works 2013), the canvas that covers a small panel doesn’t stop with the edge of the stretcher but instead continues off its top edge; the strip of canvas, perhaps twelve inches across, extends to the ceiling and continues along it for about twelve feet before dropping back down to the floor, ultimately describing a sculptural rectangle as it rejoins the panel and overlaps its lower half. Most of the canvas is raw; only the top part of the “painting” itself has been given a rough coat of white primer. Where the strip traverses the ceiling, threads of canvas hang down here and there like stalactites. Closely related is Painting Cave, consisting of thirteen white canvases placed one in front of the other and cut with an aperture that approximates the titular form. (The rather comical effect is also reminiscent of the perfect silhouettes left by cartoon characters when they barrel through walls.)

Garlands of Views features a larger panel, the canvas of which has been cut into strips that have been tied together and dangle from the stretcher like the knotted sheets of a prison escapee. (The exposed wood also seems to have been gnawed at regular intervals, perhaps by the same former captive.) This is the kind of elegant reworking of familiar components at which Subkoff excels. Private Painting (Gallery Gaze Glory Hole) adds a more unexpected element: a pair of glass eyes that peep out from two holes bored in a sheet of drywall, returning the viewer’s gaze with a hint of—what? Scopophilia? Paranoia? Another panel, It’s Really Nothing (Celestial Jackpot), is patterned with the sooty traces of burned incense sticks that have been inserted into its surface. These suggest falling debris (or, given the title, falling stars) and allude to the use of flame by artists from Yves Klein and Jannis Kounellis to Cai Guo-Qiang as a way to make marks. “Liberating” objects from their original contexts is a risky gambit; it can mark the finder as either an unreconstructed aesthete or simply, at this late stage in the game, too lazy to pick up a brush. But Subkoff’s entry in the genre is sufficiently well-placed that it not only looks consistent with the other works on view but also complements them. Dire Displacement is a wall-mounted tow-truck hood strongly reminiscent of Richard Prince’s “Car Hoods,” its curved surface mottled with burn marks. The component was originally painted with a hot rod–style flame design, so there’s a satisfying poetic justice to its fiery fate, which both doubles and negates this motif. As elsewhere in the show, a process of removal (in this case, of the original design) is again presented as simply revealing an earlier stage (the unpainted metal beneath), positing the lives of objects and images as continua without fixed beginnnings or ends.

—Michael Wilson